Writing in the Digital Age

Sometimes I come across words and I think: did I miss something? Usually this has to do with digital advances. The new word I discovered recently existed well before the Internet, but I don’t think it was named until blogs began and the genre took real flight: the listicle. For those like me who have never heard of it before, it’s a mix of list and article and simply refers to a published article written in the form of a list.

It got me googling. What other new genres are out there that I’ve never heard of before. And in that spirit, I’ve written a listicle pointing out three other genres that grabbed my attention.

Photo essays / Horizontal stories

I believe these are the same, although I’ve seen both names used. It’s a collection of photos on the same subject, each photo has a caption and they are presented in a specific order. The horizontal refers to swiping through the photos.

Twitter Fiction

I’m not a twitter fan, so I completely missed this genre and I do realize that I’m extremely late. It’s a genre tried out by a lot of current writers like David Mitchell, Margret Attwood and Philip Pullman.

An iStory is shorter than flash fiction, at a maximum of 150 words, but more than twitter fiction and the more widely known six-sentence story. Originally created for an iPod, Narrative Magazinestill publishes iStory submissions.